Page 56 of Special Ops Seduction

“Did you see it when the general actually acknowledged me like I was a fellow soldier?” She laughed. “He must have been drunk.”

“I don’t think he knows what to do,” Jonas heard himself saying, still acting like he was this alternate version of himself, who not onlycared about thingsbut cared about them to such an extent that he was conducting an entire conversation about feelings. Other people’s feelings that didn’t affect him in any way. “He knows how to treat soldiers and underlings, but you’re his daughter. I don’t think he knows how to feel about it.”

Bethan gazed at him in wonder. “Are you, Jonas Crow, talking about... feelings? Of your own accord?”

He regretted it. Deeply. But now he was in it, so he kept going. “He told me—”

“Hetoldyou? You had conversations about your feelings? With my father?”

His jaw ached from gritting his teeth so hard. “He said he would hire you himself if you were anyone else. But instead, he worries about you, because you’re his...” But he was doing the thing, wasn’t he? There was no point avoiding the meat of it. He cleared his throat. “You’re hisbaby girl. That’s a direct quote. And if you keep looking at me like that—”

“He really said that?”

Jonas didn’t know what to do with all of this... stuff. Like the way Bethan, the toughest and most dangerous woman he’d ever known, was suddenly staring at him with her eyes wide and soft when he knew she was showing him the deepest, farthest reaches of her heart.

He didn’t want that. Surely he didn’t want any part of that. Because he didn’t know what to do with any of these things, and he certainly didn’t know what to do with his own heart, stomping wildly and uncomfortably in his chest.

“Jonas,” Bethan said then, her voice soft, too.

He was terribly afraid that she was the thing that was melting him and changing him. That she was the thing that was turning him inside out, and if he didn’t do something about it, what would become of him? Where would it end? He needed to shove her away from him. Physically, mentally, and certainly emotionally. He never should have volunteered for this role in the first place.

The list of things he never should have done was getting far too long. And she was the only item on that list that made him want to repeat the same mistake. Jonas had never had regrets before. Not until her.

But he couldn’t seem to do anything but gaze down at her, soft and sparkly tonight, and wait to see how she would ruin him next.

“I’m going to have to steal her away,” came a singsong voice with a giggle.

Jonas watched—as if he were underwater, the way he’d spent a significant portion of his military career—as one of Ellen’s friends took Bethan by the hand, her high ponytail bobbing but not quite matching the high-pitched elevation of her voice.

He saw the same bemused sort of amusement in Bethan’sgaze, very similar to the expression he was pretty sure he’d been wearing all day.

“Oh, right,” Bethan said. Her lips curved. “Important bridesmaid stuff.”

“Don’t worry,” the other girl said brightly. “We’ll make sure you know the whole song.”

Bethan looked back at him as she let the other girl drag her away, her eyes wide.The whole song, she mouthed.

And he supposed it told him everything he needed to know about his current untenable emotional state that he stood there a momentgazing after her.

He shook himself, hopefully not visibly. When he was a man widely praised for his stillness.Get yourself right, he ordered himself darkly.Now.Because it didn’t matter what Bethan was doing. Jonas was now left to his own devices in the middle of a fancy cocktail party, and he wasn’t here to enjoy the appetizers.

What galled him was how long it took him to decide to stop standing around, thinking about hisfeelings, God help him, and get back to work.

He made his way around the courtyard, happily slipping back into his loud, carefree character, because that was a hell of a lot easier than navigating whatever was happening inside him tonight. He reassessed every general and high-ranking military officer there, including General Wilcox. He paid closer attention to all of Matthew’s buddies now that they were dressed and composed after their long day of frat boy shenanigans. He found himself engaged in a long conversation with self-proclaimedhead drug dealerLewis Stapleton, because despite himself, he liked the man’s Texan bluster.

He had a long conversation with Birdie about the alchemy of roses and a particular rosebush she’d grown from a cutting taken from her grandfather’s garden.

“I had no idea roses were their own histories,” he said.

“Roses are whatever we allow them to be,” Birdie replied with a smile he found particularly enigmatic,especially when he followed her gaze across the party to where her daughters were standing next to each other, laughing, looking like two unique renditions of the same theme. “Thorns and all.”

Jonas told himself he didn’twantto know what that meant.

The friendly staff was just rounding up the guests, asking them all to proceed from this courtyard to the next in this particularly Southern California space, when he came face-to-face with Dominic Carter.

At last.

Jonas didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t what he got. The other man grinned broadly, reached out his hand, and looked absolutely delighted to see Jonas.

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